Publications
The article is devoted to the conceptual analysis of the term «workmanship» in the labor of industrial workers. Based on a critical reading of Tim Ingold's «taskscape» theory, an attempt is made to answer a number of questions: Can industrial workers be creative? Do you need to have workmanship in order to work with industrial equipment? What is the role of equipment wear and tear in the industrial labor process? This paper uses an ethnography of labor at the Iriski candy factory. It is concluded that due to the wear and tear of the equipment, the labor of the operators of the candy factory requires more involvement and the use of their creative skills («living knowledge» according to Andre Gorz). Thus deterioration of equipment stimulates the creativity of the operators and makes their skills more unique. Their workmanship in the work process is determined by how skillfully they are able to «cope» with wear and tear and maintain the continuous operation of the packaging cycle. All this makes them, on the one hand, more involved in labor, but, on the other hand, and more «exploited», since their «workmanship» remains invisible to management, as well as the widespread equipment deterioration of the factory infrastructure.
The article presents an analysis of occasional iambs in Pushkin's prose, describes their rhythm against the background of verse prosody and language models of verse meter. It is concluded that a constant more or less noticeable deviation from the linguistic rhythm towards the realy verse in the prose verse-like fragments may indicate the influence of the verse prosody on the poet's prose.
This paper will focus on the development of a new computational system, which enables comparative statistical studies of the rhythm of verse and prose in different languages (currently 10 languages are operative, with the possibility of adding more). The results of the analysis can be used not only for studying the processes for the genesis, expansion, and modification of various versification systems, but also for commenting on and interpreting the verse rhythm in different national poetic traditions in comparison with their foreign sources and language prosody. In addition, the possibility to model various processes of poetic speech generation and to analyze rhythmic vocabularies of prose allows hypotheses about the cognitive mechanisms of verse generation. This system operates in a semiautomatic mode and, by minimizing errors and enabling the processing of large amounts of data, provides a unique tool for computer research on the rhythm of different modes of speech.
Based on an analysis of 53 in-depth interviews, the article reconstructs the career paths of young cultural entrepreneurs working in the creative clusters of St. Petersburg. Four style groups are distinguished, which differ in career type, locus of subjective success, identity, attitude towards education and type of sociality: ‘Downshifters’, ‘Tourists’, ‘Independent professionals’ and ‘Early businessmen’. ‘Downshifters’ make downward career mobility and professionalize leisure and/or life-style practices. ‘Tourists’ are characterized by a dotted career and career “swings” between entrepreneurship and precarious low-status employment. “Independent professionals” achieve autonomy in the context of a specific professional field. “Early businessmen” initially build their career as entrepreneurial.
A novel method for finding roots of polynomials over finite fields has been proposed. This method is based on the cyclotomic discrete Fourier transform algorithm. The improvement is achieved by using the normalized cyclic convolutions, which have a small complexity and allow matrix decomposition, as well as methods of adapting the truncated normalized cyclic convolutions calculation. For small values of degree of the error-locator polynomial the novel method has not only the smallest multiplicative complexity, but the full computational complexity of this method is also less than with other methods. Thus, the multiplicative complexity of the novel method in comparison to the method of affine decomposition (the Fedorenko-Trifonov method) is up to ten times less, although the additive complexity is approximately 10-15\% more. The novel method has matrix representation convenient for implementation.
Drawing on 60 in-depth interviews with adolescents and young men in Dagestan, I examine the construction of masculinity in the context of a postcolonial and peripheral society undergoing a transformation associated with deindustrialization, urbanization, and globalization. I focus on three male communities: freestyle wrestlers, street workout athletes, and devout Muslim youth. Members of these communities develop their variants of male identity, which differ in their attitudes toward violence, their view of the power of elders, and their form of moral sovereignty. These versions of masculinity are supported and stabilized both by configurations of power relations and mechanisms of intragroup homosociality.
Advanced Manufacturing (AM) markets are a major factor of contemporary worldwide growth that to a large extent determines countries’ competitiveness. Strengthening and/or optimizing the positions on AM markets is among the major challenges for modern industrial policy. This article discusses the structure and dynamics of the development of advanced manufacturing markets, as well as the specifics of the policies of the countries strengthening their positions in these markets. Gaining entry into AM markets currently implies individual countries’ and industries’ adopting different models which combine a wide range of factors. Small nations are rapidly applying such approaches, gaining advantages and thus increasing their competitive edge, which creates certain challenges for leading high-tech countries too slow to adjust their industrial policies. So far the basis for Industry 4.0 markets is just emerging, and remains limited to a few nations including developing ones. Country cases are presented below to illustrate the development of AM markets. The authors conclude that in the current context, no universal approaches to shaping a successful industrial policy remain. The most productive strategy is to combine the unique advantages of a particular economy.
The article analyzes the reproduction of hegemonic masculinity in the local context, using the example of masculinity of freestyle wrestlers in the Republic of Dagestan, a multinational subject of the Russian Federation dominated by the Muslim population. Based on 20 semi-structured in-depth biographical interviews with current and former wrestlers, as well as interviews with 15 young Dagestani men not involved in wrestling practices, I discover four key mechanisms of support for hegemonic masculinity. The functioning of wrestling as a mass sport in Dagestan, due to the sport specialization of the republic, leads to the generalization of the ideal of masculinity and related practices. Regular recruitment of wrestlers into the political elite thus solving the issue of its own legitimacy in the eyes of the local population, supports the associations of this variant of male subjectivity with social prestige, power and success. The wrestlers’ alliance with religious (Islamic) elites provides their masculinity with ideological legitimation. The transition from traditional to modern society due to late urbanization generates mass frustrations regarding men’s loss of control over the domestic sphere and the upbringing of their sons fraught with a crisis of reproduction of proper masculinity. In this context, freestyle wrestling sections function as an institution for maintaining the power of older men over younger ones.
This article studies the emergence and development of iambic tetrameter in Ukrainian poetry in the 18th to mid-19th century. The genesis and evolution of the verse pattern is regarded with its Russian poetry at the background. The core hypothesis of this study is that the early forms of Ukrainian iambic verse are closely related to the poetic work of Mikhail Lomonosov and Alexander Sumarokov. The shaping and development of particular features of Ukrainian metrical verse are traced from 1761 to Taras Shevchenko. According to the proposed hypothesis, the development of alternating rhythm in Shevchenko’s verse, which is normally attributed to Pushkin’s influence, may be no less determined by some innate prosodic features of the Ukrainian language.
This article analyses the prospects for the adoption of the labour ethnography methodology by Russian scholars. In many ways, the author is based on her own experience, which makes it possible to judge the possibilities of implementing ethnographic research of labor in both academic and applied projects. The topic of labor was central to Soviet sociology until the mid of 1980s; in the USSR, sociologists were mainly engaged in applied research commissioned by individual enterprises and organizations. However, the main research methods were questionnaires and interviews. The included observation was not used, except rare cases, such as Andrei Alekseev’s project, although sociologists spent a lot of time at enterprises. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the study of labor by the method of included observation did not become more popular. In many ways it was hindered by the lack of opportunities to implement such research within the institutional framework of academic structures (researchers did not have time for long-term field work, there were no appropriate financial support programs, etc.). At the same time, the ethnography of labor was becoming a possible and in-demand approach in the field of applied research. Using the example of specific applied projects in which the author was a participant, the option of “adapting” the ethnography of labor to applied tasks was proposed by reducing the duration of field work (rapid ethnography) and by the introduction of a clear division of labor between the participants of the research team (collaborative ethnography).
Imagine walking home alone on a dark street. How safe do you feel? This is one of the many questions that constitute the subject of research on perceived safety. Being often considered as an indicator of the quality of life and well-being of the population, perceived safety receives great attention from social scientists and practitioners. However, in Russia this area remains underdeveloped. With the help of regression analysis, this article addresses the relationship between socio-demographic factors (independent variables) and the perception of street safety (dependent variable) by different groups of the Russian population. The article draws on four nationally representative samples obtained via two survey projects in the years 2010 and 2016: European Social Survey (ESS) and Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey – Higher School of Economics (RLMS). Two sources of data enable for data triangulation and help to overcome the limitations of previous research on perceived safety in Russia that relied on narrow nonprobability samples. The results suggest that despite the overall decline in the level of feelings of unsafety, inequality in perceived safety remains stable in Russia. A more intense feeling of unsafety after dark in the area of residence is reported by: women; residents of large cities; older people; people with poor subjective health; people who have faced criminal victimization. No stable relationship was found between the feeling of unsafety and the level of education. In addition, interaction effects of age and gender and curvilinear effects of age are examined. Young men are the least susceptible to feeling unsafe. Older men have an increased feeling of unsafety as opposed to younger men but older women are no different from younger women in this regard.
The article considers one of the methods of identity creation in a song used by lyricists in the early 21st c.: it involves a combination of profane language typical of an urban outcast (patsan, gopnik) and metaphysical, i. e. sacred, themes. Enjoying numerous representations in contemporary Russian visual arts, the discourse of the ‘metaphysical macho guy culture (patsanstvo)’ is also inseparable from the country’s literary tradition, which, however, is trying to marginalise it yet again and confine it to a song format. Analysing the poetic output of several Russian-speaking musicians (E. Limonov, P. Korolenko, Branimir, M. Elizarov, etc.), the author identifies the key features of the discourse: its faux-playfulness, emblematic quality, and adherence to low culture. The article also proposes a genre typology of the discourse in question, noting its critical, humoristic and paradoxographical varieties. In the end, the author discovers that the image of a macho guy / urban outcast (patsan) confronted with a supernatural experience is heavily influenced by the sacral archetype, which absorbs the mo
The 50th issue of the journal marks a jubilee. We have decided to mark this exceptional event in the journal’s history by organising a ‘forum’ on an exceptional subject: the relations between two different camps in the academic world: authors and editors. Sometimes these relations are harmonious and friendly, at other times less so; at other times again, they can be plain tense, or even openly hostile. The situation is further complicated by the activities of peer reviewers (a relatively novel phenomenon in the Russian speaking world, more familiar in the USA and UK, and in parts of Western Europe). Participants were invited to share their experience of working with editors / editorial boards / authors and to describe the ideal editor (or conversely, the ideal author), and the ideal peer reviewer — as well as the anti-heroes. They were at liberty to use pseudonyms or their real names.